Legal

If there is one thing that pretty much anyone working in business fears, it is a lawsuit. Multiple complaints about a single product or service can be used to create a single class action suit, and these have a nasty reputation for going in favor of the consumer. This is why companies need to do everything they possibly can in order to prevent lawsuits from happening in the first place. After all, prevention is definitely far better than a cure, especially when the chances for curing something are low.

However, recent announcements have given manufacturers a reason to celebrate. One of the biggest problems with lawsuits is that multiple plaintiffs tend to combine their complaints and roll it all into one big suit that would end up costing the defending company a lot of money. The announcements concern a case that was recently concluded in the Supreme Court that set an interesting precedent that a number of lawyers are going to want to look into. However, before you look into these new developments you first need to understand what exactly the requirements are for a class action lawsuit of this magnitude.

The Requirements For Such Lawsuits

The first thing that plaintiffs have to do is prove that a common thread runs through all of the complaints. They need to show that the complaints come together to reveal that something is wrong with the way the company being sued is operating. They also need to prove that this common thread is more important than the particulars of each individual case. These similarities are so crucial that if the legal representation of the plaintiffs fails to prove that they exist, the lawsuit might not be allowed to proceed in the first place.

An example of the common thread rule can be seen in the various lawsuits faced by people that manufacture products that go into the construction of buildings as well as other similarly large structures. The reason that the manufacturers of these products often get sued is because of the fact that all of their products end up in buildings, and if anything goes wrong with the building than the manufacturers of said building’s individual parts face a lot of flak. The products are not seen as individuals but as part of a whole, and if the whole is getting sued than the individual parts are getting sued as well.

This means that people often file lawsuits against buildings. These happen because of health risks, safety risks, general mismanagement of the building as well as a variety of other reasons. The number of these suits that actually go to trial shows how frequently judges ignore the individual differences in each case, allowing lawyers representing such clients to go for higher payouts and causing a lot of loss to companies that end up getting caught up in these suits.